SOLEDAD INFINITA (2024)

I have a multinational and multilingual family and the roots are even richer. Despite moving around a lot, in my birth country and abroad, I have struggled to feel settled, wherever I land. This is reflected in a collection of songs about exile and saudade — recorded very much on the move — that are at once political and personal, as I take the listener with me on my search for a home, from the bodega to the diaspora. All these songs were composed on the Flamenco guitar, which sits at the core of the album, whether it’s playing Rumba Flamenca style or reaching for samba and fado colours.

I had been forced to move back to the UK from Paris, ending a glorious 11-year period of intense creativity and colourful stage life. I had been struggling to write songs in the UK, but had been working intensively on soundtracks. On one compuer game project I was working with a Dominican-American writer who shared a poem in Spanish, expressing grief for the saudade her grandmother felt for her homeland. This touched something unprocessed in me and I quickly set the poem to music. We talked briefly about collaborating on an album, but when the lyrics never came I started to write my own.

The first effort, Minha Terra, followed the theme and drew on the poem “Canção do Exílio”, by the Brasilian poet Gonçalves Dias. From there I handled the lyrics myself. Singing about exile from my chosen home, from a place that had never felt like home, proved to be quite a rich seam lyrically.

But what was stranger was how the flavour of the music changed, once I had found my theme. Once I was channelling home and exile through the Flamenco guitar, a different kind of music surfaced from the body and claimed the territory, forcing a deep dive into my own ethnic roots. Too long ignored, the dendrons of this rich cultural heritage had grown deep inside me and now flowered in the most unexpected way, helping me to understand a few things. Firstly, that being from a place is overrated. I was never from a place. And secondly, home is in the song. Which means it goes where you go.